Incorrect vaccination rate
“The RKI must become politically independent”: FDP and the Greens criticize Lothar Wieler
Wieler is “too close to the line of the federal government”, the FDP is in crisis.
© Michael Kappeler / DPA
The vaccination rate has been criticized a lot – most recently because it was given lower than it actually is. The RKI itself recently expressed doubts about the numbers. Now there is criticism from the Greens and the FDP.
Politicians from the FDP and the Greens have complained about the lack of distance between the Robert Koch Institute and the federal government and expressed dissatisfaction with the institute’s boss Lothar Wieler. The reason for the criticism is the admission of the institute on Thursday that the number of vaccinated people in Germany was given too low for a long time. At Wieler there is “no trace of error inspection,” said FDP health expert Christine Aschenberg-Dugnus (FDP) of “Bild” on Saturday.
Wieler was “too close to the line of the federal government,” she criticized. The FDP wanted the authority no longer to be subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Health: “We are working hard to guarantee the RKI political independence in the future.”
Aschenberg-Dugnus continued: “We suspected months ago that the vaccination rate was reported too low.” But the federal government has always denied this. “It’s October now, and Mr. Wieler is correcting the quota by five percent. And it is being pretended to be a success.”
The Green politician Dieter Janecek criticized in “Bild”: Other countries “do not know such problems with the recording of the vaccination quota: Germany is again overwhelmed.” Janecek also sees Wieler’s responsibility for the long school closings in Germany: “The RKI supported a course that paid special attention to children as alleged infection drivers.”
About 80 percent of adults vaccinated at least once
In a report published on Thursday, the RKI itself expressed doubts about its previously officially announced vaccination quota: “An underestimation of up to five percentage points for the proportion of people vaccinated at least once or fully vaccinated must be assumed”.
It is to be assumed “in the adult population of up to 84 percent of those who have been vaccinated at least once and of up to 80 percent of those who have been completely vaccinated”. In contrast, the figures officially reported to the RKI so far showed a vaccination rate of 79.1 percent for adults who had been vaccinated at least once and 75.4 percent for those who were fully vaccinated.
The RKI cited the reason for the bias of the numbers that some vaccination centers do not report all vaccinations to the institute – it can be assumed, especially for company doctors, that only about half of the vaccinations actually reported were recorded in the statistics. In order to check the total reported figures, the institute had a telephone survey carried out among more than 1000 citizens – the result indicated a significantly higher vaccination rate.
Company doctors describe the RKI’s accusation as “unrealistic”
The company doctors vehemently rejected the Robert Koch Institute’s suspicion of insufficient reports of corona vaccinations to the official vaccination register. “It is extremely unrealistic that only half of the company doctors reported data to the RKI,” said the President of the Association of German Company and Company Doctors, Wolfgang Panter, of the “Augsburger Allgemeine” on Saturday. “A significant part of the company doctor vaccinations appear in the database as normal doctor vaccinations,” emphasized the company doctor president.
The RKI itself insisted that those company doctors who also have a health insurance license report their data to the Berlin institute via the existing systems of the statutory health insurance associations and not via the more complicated direct reporting procedure, said Panter.
“We are assuming that this applies to around 1,500 company doctors who have vaccinated in companies and have transmitted their data to the statutory health insurance associations,” he continues. “If you realistically assume that each of these 1,500 doctors has vaccinated 1,000 employees, you would have 1.5 million vaccinations.”